Nanoman's Company was officially registered as a Canadian business fifteen years ago today. Nanoman first used the name "Nanoman's Company" in 1994, and Nanoman was first paid for his services that same year, but "Nanoman's Company" wasn't officially registered until 2002-05-17.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us through our first official sesquidecade, and a much bigger thank you to everyone who enabled us to start it!

We do virtually all of our software development and testing on older hardware. By using hardware that is much slower than what our customers use, bottlenecks become much more apparent. In our experience, being forced to keep software efficient on older hardware results in software that is remarkably faster on newer hardware.

Our old development server has had a series of hardware failures over the past few years, and our production server's hardware has reached end-of-life status. Fortunately, we've had a spare server on standby since early 2013, so after yet another failure of old hardware, we decided it was time for a server shuffle.

Today, we migrated our production server's data to our spare server. This represents a major hardware upgrade for our production server:

1.6GHz single-core 32-bit CPU

2GB RAM

7200RPM hard disk drives

Our former production server has become our replacement development server, which now sports these speedy specifications:

500MHz single-core 32-bit CPU

512MB RAM

5400RPM hard disk drives

Along with these hardware upgrades, we've made a significant number of software improvements and upgrades. Two of these software upgrades are worth mentioning:

IPv6 is finally supported. We intended to bring this online when it first became available to us in 2010, but we were too busy with other priorities to make this happen sooner. Our delay hasn't yet caused any problems for our customers, but we knew this would become a problem eventually.

New certificate authority: Let's Encrypt. Certificates from Let's Encrypt are supported natively by every web browser used by our customers, and we have a high degree of confidence in the people running Let's Encrypt, so we decided it was time to change.

To get our company functioning the way that we've always intended, we still have a lot more work to do, but we're making progress. We'll continue to announce notable achievements on our News page.

Nanoman's Company has dropped support for Adobe Flash. After we ended the last of our support for Microsoft Windows on 2010-01-01, Adobe Flash became the most frustrating software that we continued to support. Effective today (2016-10-04), we won't waste any more time on it.

Ours isn't the first organization to drop Adobe Flash support. Mozilla, Google, Facebook, Apple, and many others have already done so, and a great many more will certainly follow.

We've created a page titled End of Adobe Flash Support that explains our reasons for making this decision, and provides information for what our customers can do henceforth. Please refer to this page if you have any questions for us regarding Adobe Flash.

Nanoman's Company. After years of showing almost nothing, this page now includes a summary of who we are, what we do, and how we operate.

Privacy Policy. We've re-written this page to clarify why our privacy policy exists, to provide some details about how we protect the privacy of our customers, and information about disclosures to third parties.

We've also added two new pages:

Transparency Reports. We believe that our customers have a right to know about our experience with government requests for customer information. To date, we have never received any such requests, and we have no reason to suspect that we ever will. If we ever receive such a request, we will announce it on our News page.

History of Nanoman's Company. We're often asked about our origin story, and we've told it in fragments throughout the years, but we hadn't compiled it into anything comprehensive until now. This page isn't complete, but we think it's a pretty good start.

Please note that we still aren't accepting new customers or new projects. When this changes, an announcement will be made on our News page.

Starting today, this website's primary objective will be to serve as a tool for supporting customers of Nanoman's Company. I'll continue to use this website for my own purposes, but I'll restrict my personal activities to my personal pages. If you're looking for me or for content that used to be accessible via my homepage, please see my Nanoman page.

Also today, I've updated this website's content management system. I'd been working on this intermittently since the 2011-03-14 update, and there are several changes worth mentioning:

New layout. This is the most visible change to this website since 2005-07-02, and it retires the columns that I'd been using since 1999.

Redesigned and rewrote the menu system. The previous menu was based on another person's design, and I began to dislike it almost as soon as I finished it. I put some thought into how I wanted to replace it, and I like my new design much better.

Stopped designing pages around a minimum display resolution. This website should now be much easier to use on devices with smaller screens.

Significantly improved the efficiency of page loading, and reduced this website's overall bandwidth requirements. I achieved this by thoroughly cleaning up almost every part of my content management system, and rewriting several parts.

Upgraded the markup to XHTML 5.0.

Changed the font family to "monospace". Most of my experience with computers has been spent in text-based terminals, so I typically find it easier to read monospaced fonts than proportional fonts. More importantly, with the monospaced fonts that I see most commonly, it's usually easier to distinguish between "0", "O", and "o", and between "1", "I", and "l".

Many bugs and spelling/grammatical errors were corrected, and new ones were probably introduced.